Cunning of the Mountain Man (13 page)

“Hey, don’t he look like that feller we’s supposed to be huntin’ down?” Bascomb asked his companions.

Weak-eyed Aaron Sneed squinted and dug a grimy knuckle into one pale blue orb. “Nuh-uh. Don’t think so. Last I heard, he was supposed to be up north a ways, in the Cibolas.”

“I for one,” barrel-chested Buck Ropon declared, “am glad to hear that, Aaron. After I heard what happened to them boys that went along with the sheriff, I’m not so certain I want to tangle with the likes of Smoke Jensen.”

“Turnin’ yeller, Buck?” Charlie taunted. “ ’Sides, them boys was alone most times. They’s
five
of us. I say us five can take any Smoke Jensen, or the devil hisself if it came to that.”

Unwittingly, Charlie Bascomb had cast their fate in a direction none of them would have wanted, and which none of them later liked in the least.

After the stranger entered the general mercantile across the way, Charlie kept on worrying aloud. Like a big, old tabby will a little, bitty mouse, it finally wore down the caution so wisely held by Buck Ropon. Rising to his boots, Buck adjusted the drape of his cartridge belt across the solid slab of lard on his big belly, and nodded in the direction of the general store.

“I reckon you’re gonna keep on about that until we know for certain, ain’tcha?” Buck Ropon groused.

Charlie screwed his mouth into a tight pucker. “Wouldn’t do no harm to get a closer look.”

“Are you crazy?” a heretofore silent member of the quintet demanded. “What if it is Smoke Jensen?”

Charlie grinned widely, his eyebrows and ears rising with the intensity of it all. “Why, then, we’ve got his butt and a thousand dollars reward!”

Inside the mercantile, Smoke Jensen ducked his head to miss the hanging display of No. 4 galvanized wash-tubs, buckets, washboards, and various pieces of harness. A wizened old man with a monk’s fringe of white hair around a large expanse of bald pate glanced up through wire-rimmed half-glasses, and peered at his customer.

“What’ll it be?”

“Howdy,” Smoke addressed the man. “I could use some supplies. A slab of fatback, couple of pounds each of beans, flour, sugar, a pound of coffee beans, some ’taters.”

“Yessir, right away.” The merchant made no move to fill the order.

“Better throw in a can of baking powder, some dry onions, and a box of Winchester ,45-70-500’s if you’ve got them.”

“Ummm. That’s for that new Express Rifle, ain’t it? I don’t have any.”

In a moment of inspiration, Smoke amended his list. “Then throw in a dozen sticks of dynamite. Sixty percent will do.”

“Don’t stock that, either. You’ll have to go to the gunsmith. He’s got a powder magazine out back of his place.”

“Thank you. Uh . . . I’ll take me a couple of sticks of this horehound candy,” Smoke added as he reached for the jar.

“You got youngun’s?” the seam-faced oldster asked suspiciously.

“No Smoke replied with a smile. Truth was, Smoke Jensen had always been partial to horehound candy.

The storekeeper took in the double-gun rig: the right one slung low, butt to the rear, the left set high, canted so as to present an easy reach for the front-facing grip. A gunfighter. That fact screamed at the merchant. Hastily, to cover the tremor in his hands, he set about packaging Smoke Jensen’s supplies. Smoke, meanwhile, rolled the sweets in a sheet of waxed paper and twisted the ends closed. He stuck his prize in his right shirt pocket, under his fringed leather vest.

When the small stack of purchases had been tallied, Smoke paid for them and removed a rolled-up flour sack from a hip pocket. Slowly, carefully, he put each item inside and hefted the load.

The clerk had a dozen questions forming in his mind— but caution kept him silent. He stood behind the counter and watched his customer head for the door. Then he tilted his chin and shot a glance beyond the tall, powerfully built stranger. He saw the five hard cases in the street, facing his store. He gulped forcefully and licked dry lips with a suddenly arid tongue. How he wished he had taken seriously the suggestions of steel shutters for his windows.

Smoke Jensen stepped out onto the abbreviated boardwalk that extended porchlike around one side, and along the wider front of the general mercantile. It also fronted the next building on the main street. No doubt the structures had been built at the same time, by the same man. Blazing, afternoon sun came from the right angle to blind the eyes of Smoke Jensen to all but five pairs of legs, stuffed into an equal number of boots, arranged in a semicircle that curved out into the street and blocked all avenues of egress. All that left him was a fight, or a cowardly flight back through the store and out the rear. Through the distortion of heat waves, Smoke heard a hoarse whisper.

“It’s him, right enough.”

“What we gonna do?”

“Well, for one thing, we won’t even have to shoot him. He’s got the sun in his eyes. An’ he ain’t got nowhere to go to get away. Let’s jist jump him, boys.”

Smoke Jensen sat the sack of his supplies on a bench in front of one big display window, his vision gradually clearing. He raised his left hand in a cautioning gesture.

“I think both your ideas are wrong,” said Smoke blandly.

Suddenly, three of the men launched themselves at him. Smoke stepped in on one with groping arms. He grabbed a wrist and pivoted on powerful legs. His attacker spun away. When Smoke released him, he hurtled sideways into a shower of glass as a display window broke. He landed in the midst of a selection of bolts of cloth. Bleats of pain came from him, accompanied by the sustained tinkle of more falling shards. Smoke had already turned to face his next threat.

Two hard cases rammed into him at the same time. For all the tree-trunk strength of Smoke’s legs, they bore him off his boots. Smoke managed to turn slightly in the air and take them with him. They toppled through the open space created by the shattered window.

“Ow! Gadang, I’m cut,” one outlaw wailed, and released his hold on Smoke Jensen.

Immediately Smoke flexed his right knee and drove it into the belly of the hard case. Forcibly ejected from the display counter, he slammed painfully into a four-by-four upright of the awning over the boardwalk. His ribs could be heard breaking like dry sticks. A painful howl tore from his throat. Before Smoke could get to work on the other, hard hands clamped on his shoulders and strong arms yanked him into the store.

“You’re gonna git yours, Jensen,” Charlie Bascomb snarled.

“I’m gonna kill him!” the outlaw with the broken ribs shrieked. “Let me at him. I’ll kill him.” He stumbled through the door, fingers curled around the flashy pearl grips of his six-gun. “Get outta my way, Charlie!”

Charlie got; but before he could fully register what happened, Smoke Jensen had recovered from his manhandling, drew, and fired. Smoking lead pinwheeled the crazed gunman. He dumped over, arms flying wide. His released Colt sped from his hand and broke a glass display case. A wail of protest came from the merchant, now crouched behind his counter. He had cause for further complaint a moment later, when the thug in the window reared up and threw a wild shot at Smoke Jensen.

It spanged off the cast-iron side of a black, pot-bellied stove, ricocheted through the ceiling, and left a crack behind. Because Smoke Jensen was no longer where he had been. He moved the instant he fired. Now he swung the hot muzzle of his .44 toward the offensive gunhawk.

Smoke’s six-gun spoke, and a yelp of surprise and pain came as shards of wood from the window’s inner framework showered the gunhawk’s face. It was not enough to incapacitate him, Smoke soon learned. Two more rounds barked from the outlaw’s .45, as the remaining pair of gunslicks charged through the open doorway.

Another hasty round clipped the thug in the shoulder, a moment before the last mountain man ducked behind a floor island to escape a murderous hail of lead from the newcomers. A soft grunt told him he had scored a hit. Bullets ripped and shredded a rack of black, weatherproofed dusters, searching blindly for Smoke. He easily kept ahead of their advance, then hunkered down and duck-walked back along the section the slugs had chewed through. At the end of the island, the wounded hard case in the window spotted him and blinked in surprise.

“Nobody could live through that,” he declared in astonishment a second before he died, a bullet from Smoke Jensen turning his long, sharp nose into an inverted exclamation point.

Smoke immediately reholstered his expended six-gun and cross-drew his backup. A snigger came from Charlie Bascomb. “That’s five, iffin’ I count right, Jensen. We’re cornin’ after you.”

Could this one they called Charlie be so stupid as to not have seen his second six-gun? Or did he forget about it? Smoke let go of the questions as quickly as he had formed them. He ducked low and spotted the boots of his taunter. The big iron barked, and Charlie shrieked as he went to the floor. He found himself staring into the steely gray gaze of Smoke Jensen.

Without visible pause, Charlie began to roll toward the door. He blubbered and sobbed as he called entreaties to his remaining sidekicks. “Go after him, boys. He’s right back o’ them coats.”

Only Smoke was not there any more. One outlaw ankled around the far end of the island to discover that fact. He stared disbelievingly, while his partner emptied another six-gun into the linen dusters and his companion. The thug died without Smoke firing a shot.

The man from the Sugarloaf made up for that quickly enough, though. The last of a trio of fast shots found meat. A grunt and curse preceded a stumbling bootwalk across the plank floor toward the back counter. Smoke had only a single round left. He edged along a wall of shelves loaded with boots and shoes, until he could see the counters at the rear of the store.

From his vantage point, the gunhawk saw Smoke first.

He tripped his trigger on a final round, and immediately abandoned it for a large knife. When the target jinked to Smoke’s right, it threw his shot off. Smoke’s last slug punched through the outer wall of the store. Only then did Smoke see that the knife was not the usual hog-sticker carried by frontier hard cases. In fact, it looked more like a ground-down sword with a two-foot blade.

While that registered on Smoke, his adversary gave a roar and leaped at him. The blade swished through the air with a vicious sound. Smoke jumped back and to the side, away from the swing. He instantly stumbled tripped and fell into a double row of light farm implements. Their clutter muffled his muttered curse. A second later, the knife-wielder charged Smoke again.

His own coffin-handle Bowie, formidable under any other conditions, would be of little use against this onslaught. Smoke Jensen knew that in an instant. He bought himself some time by a quick, prone scramble down the aisle. Not quite far enough, as the two-foot blade whirred through the air and clipped a heel from Smoke’s boot. While his opponent remained off balance, Smoke thrust upright. He backed away further, both hands groping among the tools.

A snarl of triumph illuminated the contorted face of Buck Ropon. He rushed after Smoke Jensen with his altered sword raised high. He had just begun the downswing—aimed to split Smoke’s head from crown to chin—when Smoke’s hands closed on the familiar perpendicular handle of a scythe. He tightened his grip and jumped backward.

Swiftly, Smoke swung the keen-edged blade like the Grim Reaper. The long handle easily outdistanced the reach of Buck Ropon. The big, curved blade hissed through a short arc. Shock jolted up the handle to Smoke’s arms when the edge made contact. With Smoke Jensen’s enormous strength, it cut clean through. Buck Ropon had just been decapitated by a scythe.

His headless body did a grotesque quick-time dance, while twin streams of crimson fountained to the ceiling. The head, lips still skinned back in a snarl, hit and rolled on the floor. When the blood geysers diminished, the deflated corpse fell full-length. Smoke Jensen immediately recovered himself.

He set the scythe aside and started to reload both six-guns. Stunned into mindless shock, the merchant stumbled around his business, alternately sobbing and cursing. Bitterness colored his words when he was capable of comprehensible speech.

“
Mein Gott! Mein Gott!
Look at this. I’m ruined! Who will pay? Who will pay for all this damage?”

By then, Smoke Jensen had finished punching fresh cartridges into both weapons, loading six rounds in each. Seeming to ignore the distressed shopkeeper, he went from corpse to corpse, examining the contents of their pockets. He accumulated a considerable amount of paper currency and coins. Then, with the merchant looking on in horror, he stripped the boots from them and recovered even more.

It totaled about two hundred dollars and change. He handed it to the horrified man. “This should help. And that scythe is like brand new. All you need do is clean it up, and sell it to someone.”

“Never! No one would want it. I’ll never be able to sell it.”

Smoke delved into one of his own pockets and brought out a three-dollar gold piece. “Then I’ll buy it.”

“That’s it,
Mench?
You are going to hand me money and walk out of here like nothing happened?”

“You saw it all. You can tell the law what happened. They attacked me, right? I only protected myself.” “Wh-who ... are you?”

“Smoke Jensen.”

A sudden greenness crept into the existing pallor of the merchant’s face. “
Ach du lieber Gott!
” he wailed as he tottered toward the cash drawer with the money clutched in one hand.

Smoke Jensen retrieved his supplies and assessed his own damage. He found the worst that had happened was that his horehound candy sticks had been broken. He left San Antonio without a backward glance.

Smoke camped a hundred yards off the only road he figured Jeff and his hands would use coming to San Antonio through this sparsely settled country. Sure enough, early the next evening, while coffee brewed and he tended a hat-sized fire over which biscuits baked in a covered skillet, he heard the thunder of the hooves; he made it out to be three horses in a brisk canter. Smoke kept a careful eye to the north, as the sound grew louder. He had the polished metal shaving mirror from his personal kit cupped in one hand, and when the riders came close enough to recognize, he signaled them by a series of flashes.